


Here to Help You Heal

by jiemba



Series: Sanvers Week 2017 [7]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/F, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 20:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11298465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jiemba/pseuds/jiemba
Summary: Alex and Maggie experience a phenomenon where they have nightmares of their soulmate’s darkest memories.





	Here to Help You Heal

**Author's Note:**

> Sanvers week day 7 prompt - soulmate au
> 
> Tw: mentions of police brutality, violence, homophobia, suicidal ideation

In English they were known simply as Blackouts, but in Portuguese they were called _As Apreensões_  – The Fits – because even though science had determined years ago that they weren’t technically seizures, people afflicted with them were known to jerk violently, to roll their eyes back in their head, to wake with injuries they’d never fallen asleep with.   
  
Nobody really knew why people got the nightmares, but Maggie’s Tia had a theory. She’d always said that God showed people the worst of their soulmate’s past, their absolute darkest memories, so that they would truly know to treat their heart tenderly, to never hurt that person more than they’d already been hurt. Over the years Maggie fell in love, almost too easily, always too messily, but through it all she slept soundly, never quite understanding why when she’d dream about girls, she’d dream only beautiful things.  


Alex had given up waiting. As a teenager she’d wondered, with a mix of dread and curiosity, what she’d see from the memories of the man who’d one day kiss her children goodnight. She’d heard of people going to sleep and seeing car crashes, seeing abuse, seeing irreparable mistakes, seeing eating disorders, seeing loss, seeing heartbreak – but never their soulmate’s face. Jeremiah once said that his nightmares of her mother were the strangest and most painful things he’d ever felt, but they’d taught him to love his wife before he’d ever fallen _in_ love with her. So for years, whenever a beautiful boy, a sweet boy, would show interest in Alex, she’d toss and turn in her bed, wondering if this was finally the night they would wrestle each other awake until the morning light.   
  
When Alex and Maggie first meet on the tarmac, neither of them expect the following night to be so sleepless. But all month both women wake in sweats, wake sobbing, wake with blood in their mouths from where they’ve bitten their tongues, the insides of their cheeks, in pure anguish.   
  
The first night, Alex hears cupboards slamming. Screaming. She doesn’t understand the shouts, but a child’s sobs are splattering against the walls like splashes of paint. Alex sees the young girl being dragged across the kitchen floor, dragged by her hair, and she’s screaming something that sounds like “Papi” as a grown man tosses her out the front door like she weighs nothing at all. Outside, there’s blood on the pavement. The girl lets her forehead rest against the concrete, and she’s shaking, she’s wailing, her palms are scraped, and god she’s so _small_ , but before Alex can see her face she’s already scrambling down the driveway and into the nearest cornfield, burying herself so deep that maybe no one will ever find her.   
  
In the shock of early morning, Alex is wrenched back into her body with a scream caught in her throat, frantically checking her own palms, her own knees, for blood, and her bedroom smells like dirt, and she can still hear the scrambling rabbit heart of this _kid_ , this tiny girl, and she doesn’t know why.   
  
From her own apartment, Maggie finds herself treading water on a quiet beach right as the dusk burns down to night. There’s a girl straddling a surfboard, facing the horizon, head in her hands. Maybe fifteen or so, but she seems older. Darker. There’s no sound but the squawking of gulls somewhere off, the tumble of the waves, and yet Maggie can hear every thought in the girl’s head.   
  
How her father didn’t even have the fucking decency to leave her a body – how pieces of him were scattered somewhere across this very ocean. Metacarpals lost among shells. Chunks of scalp. Teeth. How she’d see a wave coming up at her in a violent white rush and think, _bodies_.   
  
How she’ll never forgive herself for not being with him at the end, but maybe, maybe, she can be with him now. The girl casts her eyes to the riptides, and thinks of how it would be easy, how at the bottom there’d be no mother to disappoint, no sister to fail, no father to disgrace. There’d be nothing at all.  
  
A plane passes over their heads, and Maggie holds her breath as she watches the girl implode at the sound, scrambling off her board and under the water, where she finally lets herself scream, and scream, and scream.   
  
Maggie wakes so drenched in sweat that she almost feels like she’s still in the ocean, the blankets bunched around her kicking feet, sucking in air like she herself had been swallowed up in the black deep.   
  
The next time, Maggie watches from behind as the same girl, now a grown woman, stabs another woman in the back – desperately, fearfully – seeing the frightful relief in her friend’s eyes as she saves his life, but all she can feel is the slick heat of blood over her knuckles, and Maggie throws up as soon as she wakes.   
  
Elsewhere, Alex is in the back seat of a beat-up old car, a young girl sobbing into her hands in the front as an older Latino boy is dragged, bloody, across the side of a highway by two cops, and she’s screaming _stop, please, he didn’t do anything_ , only forcing herself quiet after one of them points his gun directly at her and growls for her to _shut up, just shut up_.   
  
Later, Alex sees the girl being chased down a school hallway. The next night she’s older, maybe in college, and there are beer bottles thrown in her direction, strange men’s hands up her shirt without permission as they tell her, _Come on, babe, you know you’d like it if you tried it_.   
  
Maggie sees the woman in her dreams wake in a boys’ dorm with a splitting headache and stale tequila on her tongue, scrambling to find her clothes and wondering how the hell she got there. She sees a blonde girl tell the woman that she never loved her – that they were never truly family. She sees her again as a young girl, slapped hard across the face and told _what the hell were you thinking, how can I trust you to take care of your sister when you’re so careless, so selfish, so untrustworthy, your father would be so disappointed in you, you stupid, stupid girl_ , and it takes a moment after Maggie wakes to realise she’s been hitting her own face.  
  
They both see crime scenes they wish they could look away from. They both see deep down the barrels of guns. They both see nights so crushingly lonely that there’s nothing to do but sob in the shower.   
  
By the end of the month, on opposite ends of the city, Maggie and Alex have the same thought as they try to slow their breathing enough to maybe get a moment’s rest.    
  
They need a fucking drink.   
  
Maggie gets there first. M’gann already has her two shots deep by the time Alex walks through the door, wondering what could have possibly been driving the detective into sleeplessness too. She baulks a little, hanging at the entrance before Maggie can notice her.   
  
Those couldn’t have been _the_ dreams, right? That didn’t make any sense. Why would she be dreaming of a girl?   
  
No. No. That can’t be right.   
  
But Maggie feels it in her gut. As soon as Alex sits by her, darkness wearing the skin around her eyes as they look at her a little too long, a little too closely, she knows exactly what the woman saw, and has to turn her face away because the reflection of it is too much to bear. And even though she’d never seen the face of the longer-haired girl on the surfboard, she knows, instantly, that it was her.  
  
“Can’t sleep?” she hears Alex ask as M’gann places a bottle on the counter and leaves it there.   
  
Maggie tilts her head, smirks. “Sleep is for the weak.”  
  
Alex chuckles out a sigh, rubbing her eyes after the burn of bourbon claws down her throat. “Well since we’re here, you wanna play pool?”  
  
When Maggie looks back at her, she sees the woman’s face is all soft, all kind, and she finally understands what her Tia was trying to say. Because Alex clearly hasn’t put it together yet, but they’ve already seen the darkest parts of each other. They’ve learned the things nobody knows. They’ve seen each other bloody, and raw, and hopeless. But together, maybe they can see each other through the night.   
  
Every night. For the rest of their lives.  
  
She wants to cry. Dear God. She’s found her.   
  
The woman who’s here to help her heal, in a way that a non-white, non-straight, abandoned little girl from the middle of nowhere would never have truly believed she deserved.   
  
But Alex starts shifting unsteadily under her stare, and Maggie can tell she’s not ready to know.   
  
So for now she stands, tries to smile, offers Alex a nearby cue. “Thought you’d never ask, Danvers.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I'm on tumblr @jiemba if you would like to say hello : )


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